Jakarta battles open defecation with communal toilets
JAKARTA: Thousands of Jakartan households are still practicing open defecation across the city due to overcrowding and poor housing conditions.
The city administration is pushing to build more communal toilets to address the issue, but experts argue it will not be enough to solve the problem.
A 53-year-old resident of Penjaringan in North Jakarta, who asked to use the pseudonym Apriyandi, was one of them. He lives in a low-income housing area under the toll road in Pejagalan subdistrict in Penjaringan which stretches along the polluted banks of Angke River and lacks basic hygiene and sanitation facilities.
Apriyandi himself lives in a 30-square-metre home, which provides insufficient space to build a private toilet for his family of four. 'That's why we have to defecate outside [our home] near the river. We often do it quietly,' he told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday (May 28).
Apriyandi's neighborhood has some shared toilet facilities, but they are not enough to cover thousands of people living in the neighborhood. While acknowledging the health impact of dumping his waste improperly, he said that defecating in open spaces was just more practical and cheaper, since people need to pay to use the public toilet.
'It's not just me, many others do the same. The river is just closer than the toilet and I don't have to pay and queue,' said Apriyandi, who works as a day labourer.
The local neighborhood unit (RT) head Karsin admitted that many people living under the toll road have a habit of defecating in the field, road and other open spaces, largely due to inadequate housing, causing their waste to pollute the nearby environment.
'We often see their feces floating in the waterways or, worse, in our home's water channels,' Karsin said, adding that a piece of feces floated into his house during a flood. He conveyed his hope that authorities would build more proper public toilets in the neighborhood to prevent open defecation.
A 2024 data from the Statistics Indonesia (BPS) revealed that 0.19 per cent of total households in the city, or 5,300 households, were still practicing open defecation. Only five provinces in the country were declared free from open defecation: East Java, Yogyakarta, West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), South Sulawesi and Central Java.
Under Governor Pramono Anung, the city administration has pledged to revitalise all the city's low-income housing areas by 2027, with 55 kampungs undergoing infrastructure upgrades this year.
The governor also announced a plan to build more communal toilets in dense neighbourhoods to solve the sanitation problem in the city.
While authorities view the provision of public toilets as a way to solve the sanitation issue in the city, they can also push for residents to build private toilets in their homes that are connected to a shared septic tank, according to environmental health expert Corie Indria Prasasti from Surabaya-based Airlangga University.
Building more public toilets, she added, could only be an option in a situation of tight economic and space constraints if the facility meets the health and safety requirements.
'The most important thing is to reduce contact between human feces with animals,' Corie said. 'Human feces contains infectious pathogens, the contact may lead to disease transmission.'
However, building more communal toilets may not be a panacea for the open defecation problem, said urban sociologist Rakhmat Hidayat from Jakarta State University, as the issue stems from the lack of access to decent housing for thousands, if not millions, of people.
'[Communal toilets] are one of the quick and temporary solutions,' Rakhmat said, while asserting the importance of affordable housing and the public right to proper sanitation.
Heavily relying on shared toilets would only perpetuate the idea that 'poor families have to line up and share with others' to fulfill their basic rights, he went on to say.
Aside from building communal toilets, Pramono's administration also plans to build two rusunawa (low-cost rental apartment) complexes and renovate another that comprising 1,153 apartment units by next year. The rusunawas will be designated for low-income families. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
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